HOW DID WE GET HERE is a column where UNLACED’s least musical Matt Gawronski reviews an album and tries to figure out how the artistic milieu got so far away from him, so fast. Maybe it lets him work out some unresolved feelings about his long-gone boyhood, or, come to grips with the rapidly swinging pendulum that is his cultural irrelevancy, or, maybe he’s just a sadist. Today, he looks at Fall Out Boy’s 2023 album So Much For Stardust.

As the senior music writer for this magazine, I know I have to take my job very seriously and work very diligently to make sure that those below me are inspired, motivated, and worse than me.
Because of this, I have decided that my first official review for the magazine will be of the new Fall Out Boy album. I’m not going to unlock my phone to check the title, but it’s something like:
If Only There Was Stardust.

Firstly I’m going to provide some much-needed context: as a teenager growing up in the 2000’s with long hair and a gay older brother, Fall Out Boy were a staple band in my musical diet. Until I was about 18 I probably would have quietly and proudly told anyone who listened that they were my favourite band, which is obviously funny. However, listening back to some of their early albums, I can completely understand what I was attached to. Their angsty lyrics were often funny, regularly snarky, and always overwritten, while the guitar was heavy enough to satisfy pre-teen headbanging urges without being heavy enough to make me want to punch a sad girl in a moshpit.
           
“I got your love letters, corrected the grammar and sent them back.
It’s true romance is dead, I shot it in the chest then in the head.”

To a thirteen year old boy who has never been in love? Goddamn, that shit goes so hard.
I followed Fall Out Boy pretty closely up until they broke up after releasing (their best album) Folie a Deux, and then I tried to follow them pretty closely again when they came back with Save Rock and Roll, but it was definitely not great and ultimately quite forgettable. Big swing on the title though! In the years between that album and Stardust, they Didn’t Release Another Album, No Not Even One.

And now here we are: All That Twinkles is Stardust. I’m going to listen to it all the way through once, then write about each song as it comes up on the repeat. I may kill myself before this is over, and if I do, it is all Pete Wentz’s fault. Make sure that’s the headline, Louis:

Pete Wentz Cuts Down Young Man (25+2) In the Prime of His Life, Whilst He is Still Young, and Not Old.

(Editor’s note: under no circumstances can 27 be considered “young”.)

Anyway.

Love From the Other Side
When this song started the first time I had a horrible moment where I thought I’d accidentally pressed play on A Sky Full of Stars by Coldplay instead of Stardust, because the first 20 seconds sound exactly like a song from that album except if it was evil. And that’s pretty much the theme of the song. It sounds a bit like what a Fall Out Boy attempt at a Bond theme might be for a little while, but then the usual FOB catchy chorus and chunky bar chords take control and you realise that, no, Chris Martin hasn’t done something horrible to your favourite childhood band: you are in fact home. Yes it’s a home that you’ve outgrown, and you feel a bit like Gandalf in Bag End, bumping your head on light fixtures, but it’s home nonetheless. And there’s a little man here. Hi Patrick. The chorus of this song is funny because “Love, from the other side!!!” Is a pretty decent line, but then the little devil on Pete Wentz’s shoulder can’t help but smirk and force him to write down “of the apocalypse…” which is just. Hahaha. You are like 45, man.

Heartbreak Feels So Good
Do you get it? Because usually heartbreak feels so bad. Fall Out Boy do a lot of this actually. A lot of their songs are like “Heard of this thing everyone likes? Just wait. This is the opposite of that.”

See:
The (After) Life of the Party
It's Hard to Say “I Do” When I Don’t
This Ain’t a Scene, It’s an Arms Race

Anyway I like the chorus of this song. Or at least, the start of the chorus to this song. Patrick’s vocals really suit the “CRY a little, CRY a lot” and it gets me going a bit. Makes me wanna jive. But then once again, you get half a second later into the chorus and it turns into “Heartbreak feels so… nanananananana” and… I’ve seen My Chemical Romance live. I’ve seen what the peak of “Nananana” is. It isn’t this.
The beat in this song is quite nightclubby but surprisingly I’m not using that in a negative way. It works with the contrast to the rockier chorus section. Good for them. Not fucking that up is hard.

Hold Me Like a Grudge
See what I mean about the titles.
This is quite close to what Patrick Stump’s solo career sounded like, and if I googled it (not gonna), I wouldn’t be surprised to find out it was written and produced mainly by him. He sings faster, which seems to be his personal preference for verses, and then, save for the guitar, the chorus could easily be from a charting 2012 pop song. He even does a “Yeaaah yeaah” at one point that seems directly ripped from Maroon 5’s Sugar. I actually quite like this song. Unfortunately though, to find out what song that Yeaah Yeaah was from, I had to listen to Sugar, and I like that song even more.

Fake Out
Laughed out loud when this song kicked in, I won’t lie to you kids. Not because it’s particularly bad, it just caught me off guard after the three previous songs. It’s actually quite pleasant. I don’t think they’ve released any music videos for this album yet, but this song really makes me think of those 2000’s pop rock prom music videos. Check Yes Juliet kind of vibes. A boy watches the girl he fancies kissing the jock behind the bike shed. But wait…it was all a misunderstanding! She was spitting in his mouth! She hates him! She loves you boy! She wants you! And then the boy and the girl run through the forest holding hands. They’re both wearing red converse. I bet my brother fucking loves this song. The most sincere track on the album so far, despite the title.

Heaven, Iowa
Holy fuck what a terrible song.

So Good Right Now
Okay, back on the horse, but a very strange horse. I’m clicking my fingers, but it feels like I’m being brainwashed into it like in that episode of Community where they treat Glee Club like it’s a disease that captures you and makes you sing. Absolutely bizarre that Heaven, Iowa is sandwiched between two of the lightest and most jovial tracks Fall Out Boy have ever released. I really enjoyed that actually. Why does it feel so dirty to say that? I think it’s because of the chorus. “I’m feeling so good right now” feels like a cross between Pharrel’s “Because I’m happy!” and a made-up song a paedophile would sing to himself as he exits a suburban family home and sees that there are no cops waiting outside with shotguns.

The Pink Seashell (feat. Ethan Hawke)
Second worst thing Ethan Hawke has been involved in, after Before Sunset. (Editor’s note: take this out.)

I Am My Own Muse
I’d love to have been in the room when there was a discussion of the concept for this track. It’s incredibly self-serious – strings and pounding bass, “SMASH ALL THE GUITARS!”- start with the speakers first please, I’ve heard enough. I’m beginning to get the feeling that this album was written over many years with many different eras of Fall Out Boy shining through in the finished product, because this sounds so much like a song from the My Songs Know What You Did in the Dark, and Phoenix period of FOB, and that is not a compliment at all. Burdened by the slow pace of the beat, it’s not even over quickly. I unlocked my phone three times whilst listening to this song to see how long was left. Disappointed on three counts.

Flu Game
I think that the kind of chorus they use on Flu Game is the only kind that Fall Out Boy really know how to write successfully these days. Like, say the words of the chorus then extend the last syllable, which is usually “ooooooooooo”. It does work, and maybe you could describe it as a FOB motif, but it's so noticeably repeated in this album, that it overshadows all the songs I love from 2006 that also use it. Again though, it does work. This is a fun song. Where So Good Right Now had me clicking my fingers in a barbershop quartet fashion, Flu Game has me clicking my fingers in a much more villainous way. Like I’m in a gang of boys who are about to stab you to death in an alleyway whilst harmonising. This kind of evil-but-fun beat reminds me of early Panic! at the Disco. Fall Out Boy kind of aped it in 2007 for You’re Crashing, But You’re No Wave, but here it’s much more obvious that they’ve taken over the mantle from Brendon Urie, but that’s fine because he’s dead.

Baby Annihilation
Even if these little poems were actually good, the production of stuff like this always reminds me of someone doing an incredibly bad secondary school talent show performance. A fifteen year old’s voice booming out from a guitar amp that the school’s caretaker had in his office. Mist from an asbestos filled smoke machine that is giving half of the audience cancer. A teenage boy, about to ensure that he will definitely not lose his virginity within the next three years.

Also, the title of this poem is so bad that it would make the members of most small-town metal bands cringe. And half of those bands are called like, ‘Yes, I Want to Fuck a Fourteen-Year-Old’.

The Kintsugi Kid (Ten Years)
“I felt…nothing…nothing…” Yeah, pretty much. Inoffensive, uninspired, late-FOB. This is honestly what I expected most of the album to be like, and at this point I don’t know if it is overperforming or underperforming. I think that a lot of bands that have success early on in their lives, when all the interesting changes and events are happening to them, naturally struggle to produce engaging song-writing if they’re popular enough to maintain their fanbase into full adulthood. It’s hard to write a fun rock song about being a dad, or about being rich from the age of nineteen, but still those fans demand that you Rock Out! So inevitably you try, you fail, and if you’re into it enough, you diversify into different genres of music that rely less on angst and more on a skill and understanding of human nature. You start thinking about beats per minute instead of funny lines about your ex. And then it all turns a bit grey for those who fell in love with your early stuff. And that’s fine! It’s fine to be a skilled musician who made some bangers in your childhood bedroom then grew up. It’s incredibly rare for a band to be able to keep it going for twenty years and maintain the spark of inspired song writing, which I think is why a lot of song writers turn to a format of creating concept albums of sorts, like with My Chemical Romance’s Danger Days, or more recently, Arctic Monkeys’ Tranquility Base. It’s much easier to write a song based around a narrative you’ve fictionalised, than to write a song around a narrative that no one cares about. Anyway, this track sucks.

What a Time To Be Alive
This is…perfect. Perfect for the thesis I started writing above anyway. What an incredible example of how much better late-stage successful bands can be if they just completely abandon the image they’re known for and embrace something completely different. Earth Wind & Fire plus the soulful Chicago vocals of our man Patty Stump is genuinely a delight. Thirty seconds in I already knew this was my favourite of the album, and I found myself completely happy to forgive the chorus including the line “Everything is lit, except my serotonin”. That’s the power of soul, baby! Trumpets, man. Let’s fucking go. This is a real song.

So Much (For) Stardust
If What a Time to Be Alive is the pint of rum you drink at the start of the night that gets your hips a swingin’ and your head a spinnin’, then So Much (For) Stardust is the bump of ket you have at 5am immediately before falling off a carwash roof and being ran over by an Uber XL. Triumph turns to defeat, hope turns melancholy, my headphones turn to a slightly lower volume. I feel like I’ll probably be in the minority of people who listen to this album more than once in disliking this song so much, because it’s not terrible, on paper. It’s not Iowa or Muse in it’s failings, it’s just a deflation. I know it’s common practice to put your title track at the start or the end of your album, but if you’re so insistent on doing that…pick a different title track! One that’s good! Pete Wentz I will come and do it for you, you rich fuck.

Summary
I don’t really believe in star ratings out of 5 or 10, or whatever. I think it reduces the experiencing of a piece of media down to something easy to peddle and digest by those who just want to have their own opinions justified by numbers. I can’t imagine the feeling of being an artist, proud and excited, sending a new piece of work out into the world, only for it to return a turgid response of “3.5/10 – a solid effort!”. It would almost make you not want to create art at all. And I think this album is art, in the literal sense and also in a more poetic way. It really does exemplify the ways in which letting go to expectations can help you succeed past your prime, and how holding onto the angst of youth is inevitably futile. Fall Out Boy aren’t the best band to ever do it, no, but they’re one of the most successful bands to ever do it for this long, in this day and age, whilst still producing a few good tunes.
Anyway:

So Much (For) Stardust – 2 stars out of 5
 

(I’ve thought about it, and Love From the Other Side would be a decent Bond title.)